What is the benefit of doing a custom therapy intensive instead of weekly therapy?
At The Finding Place, our therapists offer custom intensive sessions where clients come to us for three days of intensive one-on-one therapy. Some intensive clients are local; others come to us from other parts of the country, but they all have the same goal–to heal, transform, and gain both freedom and a higher quality of life.
Intensives offer time for a deep dive into treatment, away from interruptions, distractions, and the stop/start of classic weekly therapy. This deep dive excavates and unearths the patterns of relating, reacting, and responding that were learned unconsciously in childhood and replicated throughout life. Intensives provide time to truly and fully unpack experiences you’ve spent a lifetime minimizing.
What kind of therapies are used during therapy intensives?
Spending three days simply talking with a therapist may help you feel understood and validated, but it will not translate into lasting life change. This is the reason our therapists use brain-based and experiential therapies like Brainspotting, EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), which is also called parts work, art therapy, and body-based therapies during our trauma therapy intensives.
These therapies bypass the thinking brain to address core unconscious beliefs that are picked up in childhood and carried with us into adulthood. Using these modalities, your therapist can help you replace faulty programming and unconscious core beliefs with the truths of both who you are and who you are meant to be.
Think of it this way–when you go to a new city, you use a map to get around. Brain-based therapies like Brainspotting and EMDR provide a map for your therapist to get around in your subconscious mind. That map provides a way to navigate the subcortical brain, to access experiences that were never processed, to open files in the brain, and engage the subconscious mind much more effectively than cognitive-based therapies.
While that may sound scary or “out there,” these brain-based therapies are based in science, very gentle, and always proceed at the pace of safety in our clinic.
Using brain-body therapeutic techniques together with the intensive model, our clients go beyond being understood and validated by a therapist. The modalities facilitate a profound understanding within one’s self, and the longer time frame of the intensive produces lasting and sustainable change.
Is three days really enough time for me?
Because we utilize pre-intensive phone calls to build trust and lay out goals before you arrive, we have found that three days of one-on-one therapy is the “sweet spot” for our therapy intensives, whether you are specifically looking for a Brainspotting therapy intensive, an EMDR therapy intensive, a trauma therapy intensive, or more likely, a combination of therapies that works best for you. There’s no need to spend a week or more in a workshop environment where the focus is not solely on you.
Intensives give you enough time to not only identify, disrupt, and fully resolve the harmful patterns in your life but also dream your life forward, creating a life without the baggage or fears of the past. You will lay solid groundwork for maintaining the growth you have achieved and leave with a self-energy that can be maintained. You will also learn how to regain it if you lose it. This is a profound shift from being the victim to being the leader and living in a wholly integrated way.
Intensives, brain-based approaches, and body-based techniques are extremely effective on their own, but together, they are a powerhouse approach for producing lifelong change.
The Finding Place Counseling offers both mental health counseling in Little Rock, Arkansas, and custom therapy intensives that serve clients across the country. Visit our FAQ page then contact us to learn more.
